Bøker utgitt av Yale University Press

By 1400, the once-mighty Byzantine Empire stood on the verge of destruction. Most of its territories had been lost to the Ottoman Turks, and Constantinople was under close blockade. Against all odds, Byzantium lingered on for another fifty years until 1453, when the Ottomans dramatically toppled the capitals walls. During this bleak and uncertain time, ordinary Byzantines faced difficult decisions to protect their livelihoods and families against the death throes of their homeland. In this evocative and moving book, Jonathan Harris explores individual stories of diplomatic maneuverings, covert defiance, and sheer luck against a backdrop of major historical currents and offers a new perspective on the real reasons behind the fall of this extraordinarily fascinating empire.

Though Bill Clinton has been out of office since 2001, public fascination with him continues unabated.Many books about Clinton have been published in recent years, but shockingly, no single-volume biography covers the full scope of Clintons life from the cradle to the present day, not even Clintons own account, My Life. More troubling still, books on Clinton have tended to be highly polarized, casting the former president in an overly positive or negative light.In this, the first complete oral history of Clintons life, historian Michael Takiff presents the first truly balanced book on one of our nations most controversial and fascinating presidents. Through more than 150 chronologically arranged interviews with key figures including Bob Dole, James Carville, and Tom Brokaw, among many others, A Complicated Man goes far beyond the well-worn party-line territory to capture the larger-than-life essence of Clinton the man. With the tremendous attention given to the Lewinsky scandal, it is easy to overlook the presidents humble upbringing, as well as his many achievements at home and abroad: the longest economic boom in American history, a balanced budget, successful intervention in the Balkans, and a series of landmark, if controversial, free-trade agreements. Through the candid recollections of Takiffs many subjects, A Complicated Man leaves no area unexplored, revealing the most complete and unexpected portrait of our forty-second president published to date.

After the vast destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans faces a rare chance to rebuild, with an unprecedented opportunity to plan what gets built. As the city’s director of planning from 1992 until 2000, Kristina Ford is uniquely placed to use these opportunities as a springboard for an eye-opening discussion of the intransigent problems and promising possibilities facing city planners across the nation and beyond.In The Trouble with City Planning, Ford argues that almost no part of our usual understanding of the phrase “city planning” is accurate: not our conception of the plan itself, nor our sense of what city planners do or who plans are made for or how planners determine what citizens want. Most important, our conventional understanding does not tell us how a plan affects what gets built in any city in America.Ford advances several planning innovations that, if adopted, could be crucial for restoring New Orleans, but also transformative wherever citizens are troubled by the results of their city’s plan. This keenly intelligent book is destined to become a classic for planners and citizens alike.

In this welcome addition to the immensely popular Yale Broadway Masters series, Larry Starr focuses fresh attention on George Gershwins Broadway contributions and examines their centrality to the composers entire career. Starr presents Gershwin as a composer with a unified musical visiona vision developed on Broadway and used as a source of strength in his well-known concert music. In turn, Gershwins concert-hall experience enriched and strengthened his musicals, leading eventually to his great Broadway opera, Porgy and Bess. Through the prism of three major showsLady Be Good (1924), Of Thee I Sing (1931), and Porgy and Bess (1935)Starr highlights Gershwins distinctive contributions to the evolution of the Broadway musical. In addition, the author considers Gershwins musical language, his compositions for the concert hall, and his movie scores for Hollywood in the light of his Broadway experience.

Born into a Xhosa royal family around 1792 in South Africa, Jan Tzatzoe was destined to live in an era of profound changeone that witnessed the arrival and entrenchment of European colonialism. As a missionary, chief, and cultural intermediary on the eastern Cape frontier and in Cape Town and a traveler in Great Britain, Tzatzoe helped foster the merging of African and European worlds into a new South African reality. Yet, by the 1860s, despite his determined resistance, he was an oppressed subject of harsh British colonial rule. In this innovative, richly researched, and splendidly written biography, Roger S. Levine reclaims Tzatzoe's lost story and analyzes his contributions to, and experiences with, the turbulent colonial world to argue for the crucial role of Africans as agents of cultural and intellectual change.

A grand and fascinating figure in Victorian politics, the charismatic Lord Palmerston (1784–1865) served as foreign secretary for fifteen years and prime minister for nine, engaged in struggles with everyone from the Duke of Wellington to Lord John Russell to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, engineered the defeat of the Russians in the Crimean War, and played a major role in the development of liberalism and the Liberal Party. This comprehensive biography, informed by unprecedented research in the statesman’s personal archives, gives full weight not only to Palmerston’s foreign policy achievements, but also to his domestic political activity, political thought, life as a landlord, and private life and affairs. Through the lens of the milieu of his times, the book pinpoints for the first time the nature and extent of Palmerston’s contributions to the making of modern Britain.

The seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell (16211678) is one of the most intriguing figures in English literature. A noted civil servant under Cromwells Protectorate, he has been variously identified as a patriot, spy, conspirator, concealed homosexual, father to the liberal tradition, and incendiary satirical pamphleteer and freethinker. But while Marvells poetry and prose has attracted a wide modern following, his prose is known only to specialists, and much of his personal life remains shrouded in mystery.Nigel Smiths pivotal biography provides an unparalleled look into Marvells life, from his early employment as a tutor and gentlemans companion to his suspicious death, reputedly a politically fueled poisoning. Drawing on exhaustive archival research, the voluminous corpus of Marvells previously little known writing, and recent scholarship across several disciplines, Smiths portrait becomes the definitive account of this elusive life.

Few buildings have played so central a role in Spains history as the monastery-palace of San Lorenzo del Escorial. Colossal in size and imposingeven forbiddingin appearance, the Escorial has invited and defied description for four centuries. Part palace, part monastery, part mausoleum, it has also served as a shrine, a school, a repository for thousands of relics, and one of the greatest libraries of its time.Constructed over the course of more than twenty years, the Escorial challenged and provoked, becoming for some a symbol of superstition and oppression, for others a wonder of the world. Now a World Heritage Site, it is visited by thousands of travelers every year.In this intriguing study, Henry Kamen looks at the circumstances that brought the young Philip II to commission construction of the Escorial in 1563. He explores Philips motivation, the influence of his travels, the meaning of the design, and its place in Spanish culture. It represents a highly engaging narrative of the high point of Spanish imperial dominance, in which contemporary preoccupations with art, religion, and power are analyzed in the context of this remarkable building.

Christians and Pagans offers a comprehensive and highly readable account of the coming of Christianity to Britain, its coexistence or conflict with paganism, and its impact on the lives of both indigenous islanders and invading Anglo-Saxons.The Christianity of Roman Britain, so often treated in isolation, is here deftly integrated with the history of the British churches of the Celtic world, and with the histories of Ireland, Iona, and Pictland. Combining chronicle and literary evidence with the fruits of the latest archaeological research, Malcolm Lambert illuminates how the conversion process changed the hearts and minds of early Britain.

In this meticulously researched book, Oliver Hilmes paints a fascinating and revealing picture of the extraordinary Cosima Wagnerillegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt, wife of the conductor Hans von Blow, then mistress and subsequently wife of Richard Wagner. After Wagners death in 1883 Cosima played a crucial role in the promulgation and politicization of his works, assuming control of the Bayreuth Festival and transforming it into a shrine to German nationalism. The High Priestess of the Wagnerian cult, Cosima lived on for almost fifty years, crafting the image of Richard Wagner through her organizational ability and ideological tenacity.The first book to make use of the available documentation at Bayreuth, this biography explores the achievements of this remarkable and obsessive woman while illuminating a still-hidden chapter of European cultural history.

This book presents an entirely fresh view of the upbringing of English children in upper and professional class families over three centuries. Drawing on direct testimony from contemporary diaries and letters, the book revises previous understandings of parenting and what it was like to grow up in the period between 1600 and 1914.Using advice literature which set out developing ideologies of childhood, gender and parenting, the book explores the separate but complementary roles of mothers and fathers in raising their children. Male upbringing is discussed in terms of schooling, female through the moral and social context of a domestic schoolroom dominated by a governess. Boys were trained for the world, girls for society and marriage. Rare teenage diaries surviving from the Georgian and Victorian periods show teenagers speaking for themselves about education; relationships with parents, siblings and friends; and their social, class and gender identity.

Josef Stalin exercised supreme power in the Soviet Union from 1929 until his death in 1953. During that quarter-century, by Oleg Khlevniuk's estimate, he caused the imprisonment and execution of no fewer than a million Soviet citizens per year. Millions more were victims of famine directly resulting from Stalin's policies. What drove him toward such ruthlessness? This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator's life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history. In brief, revealing prologues to each chapter, Khlevniuk takes his reader into Stalin's favorite dacha, where the innermost circle of Soviet leadership gathered as their vozhd lay dying. Chronological chapters then illuminate major themes: Stalin's childhood, his involvement in the Revolution and the early Bolshevik government under Lenin, his assumption of undivided power and mandate for industrialization and collectivization, the Terror, World War II, and the postwar period. At the book's conclusion, the author presents a cogent warning against nostalgia for the Stalinist era.